Welcome to the sixth edition of Discogs Cheapos, a column wherein I spotlight a handful of old, exceptional records that sell for single-digits on the Discogs website. It’s been three years since the last edition – I am a thoroughly infrequent man – and seeing as record prices really went ape over the last few years, stupidly so in fact, deals are getting harder and harder to spot. But they’re there! Today is my birthday, and rather than sit here re-gramming all the sweet birthday-shoutout Instagram stories that I’m sure are coming in… (yup, any minute now…), I thought I’d offer this gift to you, dear reader – here are six old records completely worth picking up, probably for under fifty bucks total if you set your mind to it.

Charm City Suicides Green Blood 7″ (Baths Of Power, 2000)
Charm City Suicides existed right around the turn of the century, which in retrospect was a pretty terrible time for being an outrageously snotty and primitive punk rock band. The collector-based Killed By Death craze hadn’t quite caught on with punks in their twenties, whereas the waning first-wave of screamo maintained significant message-board chatter alongside the burgeoning stadium-crust of Tragedy (whose debut was also released in 2000) as we celebrated the arrival of Makeoutclub (look it up) and hipster dance nights. Not a lot of room in the conversation for dirty local punk bands with poorly-photocopied record covers at the time, which is perhaps why I still haven’t seen Charm City Suicides get their due. Their self-titled full-length from the following year remains one of my absolute favorite punk records of the ’00s, a catchy, ridiculous, primal, memorable romp through the overgrown back-alleys of Baltimore’s suburbs (and unexpectedly released by Youth Attack on compact disc). While that album is a true pinnacle of don’t-care punk rock – check “Out At The Reservoir”, “I Wanna Get With You” and “Pit Of Sorrow” to confirm the group’s transcendent melding of Chain Gang, Flipper and Germs – their debut single Green Blood is right up there too, exceptionally high quality and completely out of time. “I’m In Love” is the only track up on YouTube, where you can sample its trash-can drums, wrong-note riffs and flustered squawk of vocalist Mike Apichella. If you’re like me and you love home-recorded, home-released punk EPs that the band themselves folded, stuffed and mailed, it’s a five out of five.

Jet Bronx & The Forbidden Ain’t Doin’ Nothin’ / I Can’t Stand It 7″ (Lightning, 1977)
1977 was a great year for punk because punk wasn’t remotely figured out yet. A band like Jet Bronx & The Forbidden, for example, were more punk than not, but they also sounded like the recent past rather than a hysterical refusal of it. “Ain’t Doin’ Nothin'” delivers the excellent punk attitude of slacking off and rolling one’s eyes at authority before returning one’s attention back to a shoplifted comic book, and while the music has enough edge to tip a tense pub scene into violence (and I love that they went with “doin’ nothin'” instead of “doing nothing”), it still kinda sounds like Dr. Hook as much as Richard Hell. “I Can’t Stand It” is even more pre-punk sounding, and nearly as killer, like a British Black Oak Arkansas shaking off the gratuitous bloat of ’70s rock like a wet dog for something streamlined, gruff and relatable. Bassist George Ford later went on to Hall & Oates and drummer Stuart Elliott later joined Cockney Rebel, which offers some further insight into Jet Bronx & The Forbidden’s brief moment of existence, this seven-inch single their sole release. It’s a timeless teenage drop-out ripper, and while I know international shipping costs are an absolute beast these days, copies are currently starting at sixty-three cents over on Discogs, astronomically less than many of Jet Bronx’s class-of-’77 cohort.

St. Joseph & The Abandoned Food St. Joseph & The Abandoned Food 7″ (The Aporia Label, 1999)
Pick of the litter right here, when rated on both quality and cost! St. Joseph & The Abandoned Food featured a young Noel Harmonson on guitar – you may recognize his name from his time spent with Comets On Fire and Heron Oblivion; I sure do – and if you ever doubted that he was always ahead of the curve and cool-as-hell for it, go and purchase this self-titled single for three bucks right this very moment. “Harlequin Knights” sounds like that first The Rapture EP on Gravity if the group was inspired by The Electric Eels and CBGBs weeknight no-wave gigs. Harmonson’s guitar is slippery as an eel as vocalist Joseph Mosconi hyperventilates his lyrics… how this isn’t a five hundred dollar obscurity reissued by Tom Lax is a mystery to me. “Grub Blastin'” reminds me of Los Cincos, also operating on the West Coast around roughly the same time, only ten times more demented, as if these guys tried to buy a Rolling Stones record but left the shop with US Maple’s Sang Phat Editor instead. It’s a stunning double-shot of over-the-top art-punk, and I truly cannot believe copies are just sitting around on the internet for less change than a rest-stop KitKat.

Toner High Cinderella And The Slipper Fit Perfectly LP (Sissysound / Panzerkreuz, 2011)
There’s some tough competition, but this might be the strangest record of this bunch. At the very least, it’s the most recent, but the sounds of Toner High Cinderella’s “2009 winter depression” record are untethered to conventional space and time. The presumably Dutch artist (could be just one guy, who knows?) struck gold with this loose concept album about, uh, the story of Cinderella, inexplicably rendered in cosmic stoner-psych 2D. Imagine, if you will, Josh Homme completely enamored with two records: Earth’s Pentastar and Tony Conrad & Faust’s Outside The Dream Syndicate. It’s like the best concept record Boris never wrote, and you don’t have to shell out a couple Benjamins to partake in the fun. Toner High Cinderella slips the minimalist glass slipper of droning sludge-rock into the delicate foot of kraut-rock space-vision, and, seeing as it was mostly promoted and distributed by seminal dance label Crème Organization, it never seemed to find its footing anywhere, no pun intended. (The LP is available on Crème’s Bandcamp page right now, but without a single corresponding streamable track – I love that move!) That’s fine, I suppose, as any gem that shines with the hypnotic, prismatic light of And The Slipper Fit Perfectly is bound for eventual discovery and celebration.

Unwanted Christmas Presents Unwanted Christmas Presents LP (Electrocution, 1993)
I remember when Kevin of Pink Reason hyped up the Unwanted Christmas Presents LP online, maybe like a dozen years ago now, and I thought, well, that’s it: this guy has an audience, he has cred, and he’s going to send this cheap record into the collector’s marketplace tout de suite. That increased prominence and dollar value never took place, however – such is the enduring undesirability of this antagonizing, demoralizing album. Unwanted Christmas Presents were a duo, not unlike Ween in many respects, from their willingness to see any bad idea through to its conclusion and their delight in taking apart typical rock music and using it for spare parts while disregarding the essentials. “Keith” and “Jonathan” were from West Virginia, of all unfortunate places, and their noisy, unschooled avant-garde garage-punk is thrilling, full of dingy riffs and occasionally even rockin’ tunes, delivered with the chutzpah of the most nihilistic Subterranean Records groups, the Midwestern mix of vigor and torpor you might hear in V-3 (and yes, Pink Reason too) and the unsettling disturbances of Culturcide. It’s music sure to please troubled high-school bullies of the early ’90s as well as today’s WFMU-DJ weirdo musicologists, and somehow, there always seems to be a handful of cheap copies sitting around for sale on the internet. They probably sold a dozen copies or less when it first came out, and laughed about it, the group’s name clearly an intentionally self-fulfilling prophecy.

Will To Live Will To Live 12″ (Flesh, 1986)
If you lived in or near New Jersey in the ’90s, ’00s or even ’10s and enjoyed digging through the bargain bins tucked under the waist-level racks at record shops, chances are you came across records by Amor Fati, New Jersey’s answer to Throbbing Gristle (or at least its answer to Sleep Chamber). Amor Fati was the name used by Amaury Perez for his solo industrial music, and he released records on his own Flesh Records label, loosely taping or gluing pieces of paper to plain record jackets, sure to get ripped in the shuffle amongst kinder, gentler LPs. Those Amor Fati records are cool, certainly cool for their time, though probably inessential unless you’re a real art-aktion kinda freak (which I guess I am, since I have those records). The one you really wanna grab, however, is the self-titled EP from Will To Live, the group Amor Fati played guitar and sang for in the mid ’80s. They meld a lot of things that are overtly appreciated in the underground now: the staunch and brittle anger of Crass; the masochistic eroticism of Swans in both noise-rock and goth-industrial modes; the acerbic American post-punk of Spike In Vain; the “are we even musicians?” misery-based drone-punk of Campingsex. And they still sound like they probably opened for Rites Of Spring, SPK and Die Kreuzen when they rolled up to City Gardens in Trenton sometime in 1986, when flyers and word of mouth were the only hope a young alternative-type had in getting there. Will To Live existed far beyond mainstream society back then, and while it was arguably easier to avoid the all-seeing corporate eye in 1986 than right now, they’re still dope as hell for it, capped off with this aggressively brooding record that no one seems to know about.

As you may have noticed, fewer records are rolling through these pages in recent months. Chalk it up to a variety of reasons: record prices going up (how many thirty-dollar LPs can I possibly fit into my budget?), records caught in endless plant delays, labels focusing on digital and cassettes in order to release music in a timely fashion, and so on. It’s not the best time to try to release a record, seeing as if you press two- or three-hundred copies, you’re guaranteed to either sell out immediately and watch as they sell for a hundred bucks a pop two weeks later (and fans yell at you for it), or barely sell a dozen and sit on the rest forever. It’s hard and only getting harder! So, now that I’ve outlined a particularly bleak vinyl landscape, allow me to remind you, fellow music enthusiast, that there are still millions of old records that rule, sitting out there in bargain bins (and, of course, on Discogs) waiting to be snatched up for pennies on the dollar. Fill up your cart with these!

Envy Envy 7″ (New Direction, 1995)
Let’s kick this off with some distinctive… generic youth-crew hardcore?? Bear with me on this one: Envy were a straight-edge hardcore band from Buffalo in the mid ’90s, strongly indebted to the Revelation Records scene that broke out while they were in middle school. The cover photo is an almost exact rip of the shot used on Youth Of Today’s Disengage 7″, which has a song called, you guessed it, “Envy”. The label, which was probably run by someone in Envy, takes its name from the opening Gorilla Biscuits song on their album, of whom a substantial portion of Envy’s riffs are indebted; I could go on but you get the picture. Extreme youth-crew homage done less than a decade from its initial source, which arrived right when I was a teenager eager to discover positive mosh music. Extremely generic (yet enjoyable) stuff here, with the exception of one crucial aspect: the drums. This drummer must’ve had absolutely no idea what he was doing, so in an inexplicable twist, he does a push-beat (where you hit the snare on the one instead of the two) for all of these songs, giving them a bizarre energy all their own. Can you even mosh in a standard youth-crew style to this rhythm? Vocalist Larry Ransom is perfectly squeaky and impassioned about skating and friends and the edge, and paired with the world’s worst hardcore drumming, you’ve got a two-dollar hardcore single that’s as hysterical as it is typical.

Last Few Days Too Much Is Not Enough 12″ (Touch, 1986)
Okay, so that Envy record definitely won’t be for everyone, especially those of you who (insert eye-roll emoji) only like good music, but this Last Few Days record comes with the highest possible recommendation across the board – if you remotely like the music I champion on here, you need a copy of this. I know little of this European post-punk group, mostly just that they toured with Laibach, kept an extremely low profile and had cool show posters (of which I desperately need to obtain). Somehow, they got on Touch way back in 1985 – yes, the same high-minded electronic composition label that continues to this day – and released this absolute monster of an industrial post-punk tune. I’m referring to the title track, and oh my god, put it on now! It’s a gnarly rhythmic force, little more than live drums and pulsing bass peppered with the occasional confrontational vocal. Imagine Emptyset remixing Black Eyes, Coil remixing Rema Rema, or something Troubleman Unlimited would’ve released between the years of 1999 and 2005 (and would’ve been their best release of the year). “Solemn Warnings” is an eerie tape experiment of horns and sounds, and “If The Bonds Are Not To Burst” is a foreboding organ drone with shouted vocals, adding to the ominous industrial vibe. Fans of Test Dept and SPK need to scoop this immediately, before some hip retrospective compilation drops with “Too Much Is Not Enough” prominently featured and this record starts to command a collector’s price.

The Musical Janeens Sell Out LP (Plurex, 1980)
Truly stumped as to why this one remains a five-dollar cheapo. We’re talking about noisy post-punk from 1980 on the Plurex label, an imprint I hold dearly in my heart for releasing such all-time punk classics as Filth’s Don’t Hide Your Hate and Tits’ Daddy Is My Pusher, both of which command three figures (and are worth every penny). Featuring one member who would later join The Human League, The Musical Janeens played rambunctiously amateur post-punk, favoring improvisational freakery and dub aesthetics to punk’s speedy rock n’ roll formula. Imagine The Door & The Window trying to replicate Public Image Ltd’s dub style to befuddled live audiences across Europe, which is also precisely in front of whom Sell Out was recorded. It would’ve fit in nicely alongside the Fuck Off Records catalog, presumably excluded from Johan Kugelberg’s Top 100 DIY singles on the simple fact that this is an album, not a single. I absolutely love this defiant, early Rough Trade sound, and I know I’m not alone in that opinion, so it continues to mystify me why The Musical Janeens are unheralded and underpriced. How long until the lavish Vinyl On Demand reissue treatment?

Ryuichi Sakamoto featuring Thomas Dolby ‎Field Work 12″ (10, 1985)
Did you know that these two ’80s synth-pop pioneers got together to make some tracks way back when? I only found out a couple years ago but I’ve been spinning my copy of Field Work religiously ever since. While most collaborations are often less than the sum of their parts, “Field Work” is a monster banger, like an evolved strain of city-pop based in the cyber-metropolitan zone that Sonic the Hedgehog might run through. What a tune! It’s so fast yet tidy, giving me visions of Japanese bullet trains with Thomas Dolby waving goodbye from the window, his perfectly weird lyrics lodging themselves in your brain (is he supposed to be, like, an archaeologist in love or something?). How come of all the millions of artists making synth-pop today, none of them come close to this? The b-side is a solo Sakamoto outing, and on an entirely different tip: it’s a beautifully bent tone poem that pre-dates the Mille Plateaux IDM scene by at least ten years while still sounding fresh today. Pretty essential electronic listening on both sides, and due to the various domestic and international pressings back in 1985, you can own one for like three bucks plus shipping.

Ziamaluch Ziamaluch 12″ (Flipped Out, 1996)
Fans of Bill Orcutt, take note! He might be the most notable guitarist to spew unhinged blues chords today, but there was also at least Ziamaluch doing it in the ’90s too, the moniker used by one Jackson Wingate. He ran the Flipped Out label that released this, and he christened its discography appropriately with this self-titled one-sided LP in a limited run of two-hundred copies all with repurposed LP sleeves. Wingate absolutely shreds through this one, very much in line with the first run of Bill Orcutt solo records as well as the great Demo Moe album and Jeph Jerman’s Blowhole project, except this is a solo guitar record through and through. 1996 is not a year known for excellent improvised guitar noise, which makes this one stand out even stronger in my humble opinion. I kinda love how emboldened and out-of-time the upstate NY noisy underground has been from the early ’90s through to the present, clearly in love with their own work and the work of their friends rather than concerning themselves with popularity, social standing or, ugh, “making it”. Next time I need my ears cleaned out, I’m gonna lay down on a tarp and crank Ziamaluch to eleven.